Olivia: We tend to think of freedom as a destination you arrive at. But what if the most dangerous part of the journey isn't the escape, but what comes after? What if freedom itself is a battle you have to learn how to fight, long after you’ve crossed the border? Jackson: That’s a powerful thought. We love these clean, heroic escape narratives, but reality is almost never that simple. The idea that the struggle intensifies after you’re supposedly "free" is deeply unsettling. Olivia: It’s the central, haunting theme in the book we’re discussing today: In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park. It is one of the most harrowing and, frankly, inspiring memoirs I have ever read. Jackson: And this isn't just any memoir. Park became a global phenomenon after a viral speech at the One Young World summit. She's now one of the most prominent, and sometimes controversial, voices on North Korean human rights. Her story is both a personal testimony and a political lightning rod. Olivia: Absolutely. And to understand her journey, and the controversies, we have to start inside the world she was so desperate to escape. A world she describes as less a country and more a psychological prison.

Jackson: A psychological prison. That’s a heavy phrase. We hear about the famine and the labor camps, but what does that mental aspect actually look like day-to-day? Olivia: It’s a total system of control that begins before you’re even born. It’s called songbun. Essentially, it’s a caste system based on your family’s perceived loyalty to the regime, going back generations. Your songbun determines everything: where you can live, what job you can get, your access to food, education, everything. Jackson: Wow, so you’re born with a score you can’t change? What happened with Yeonmi’s family? Olivia: Their story is a perfect example of how precarious it is. Her father’s family had a relatively good status. But then, his brother—Yeonmi's uncle—was accused of a crime. And in North Korea, punishment is collective. The entire family was demoted. Her father, who she says had this incredible entrepreneurial spirit, was suddenly blocked from any real opportunity. His potential was just erased by the system. Jackson: That’s devastating. So you have this rigid social structure, but what about the propaganda? We see the clips of people crying for the Dear Leader. How does that coexist with the reality of starvation and suffering? Olivia: That’s the core of the psychological prison. Yeonmi calls it an "emotional dictatorship." From birth, you’re taught the Kims are literal gods. They can read your thoughts. You learn math by calculating, and I’m quoting from the book here, "If you kill one American bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American bastards do you have?" Jackson: Oh my god. That’s chilling. But how can a person hold that belief when their own reality is so bleak? When they’re starving? Olivia: Yeonmi describes it as a kind of "doublethink." She says North Koreans have two stories running in their heads at all times, like trains on parallel tracks. One is what you’re taught to believe, the other is what you see with your own eyes. You learn to shout slogans denouncing capitalism in the morning, and then in the afternoon, you go to the jangmadang—the black market—to buy smuggled goods to survive. You live in that contradiction. It’s the only way. Jackson: That sounds exhausting. A life of constant mental gymnastics. It makes sense why you'd risk absolutely everything to get out. But the book makes it terrifyingly clear that crossing the river isn't the end of the horror.

Olivia: Not even close. In fact, for Yeonmi, it was the beginning of a different kind of hell. She was just thirteen, severely ill from a botched surgery in a filthy North Korean hospital, when she and her mother decided to cross the frozen Yalu River into China. Her older sister, Eunmi, had already disappeared across the border, and they were desperate to find her and to survive. Jackson: I can’t even imagine that. A sick thirteen-year-old crossing a frozen river at night with soldiers on patrol. Olivia: The crossing itself was terrifying. A guard spotted them, and they had to be dragged across the ice by their smuggler. But the real horror began the moment they reached the Chinese side. They were taken to a shack and met by a broker, a Chinese man of Korean descent. He immediately separated Yeonmi from her mother. Jackson: Oh no. I have a bad feeling about this. Olivia: Yeonmi was in one room, and she could hear her mother pleading in the other. The broker was going to sexually assault Yeonmi. And in that moment, her mother made an impossible choice. She offered herself to the broker to save her daughter. Yeonmi writes, "That was my introduction to sex." She was thirteen years old, hiding in a corner, listening to her mother being raped to protect her. Jackson: That is just... unimaginable. The idea that to protect your child from one horror, you have to subject yourself to another. It completely shatters that simple narrative of 'escaping to safety.' Olivia: It does. And it gets worse. They quickly realize they haven't been rescued; they've been sold. The book details the cold, transactional nature of it. Her mother was sold for about $65, and Yeonmi, being younger, was sold for just under $2,000. She writes, "I will never forget the burning humiliation of listening to these negotiations, of being turned into a piece of merchandise in the space of a few hours." Jackson: So their escape from a state that owned them led them directly into the hands of traffickers who owned them. The cage just changed its shape. Olivia: Precisely. And this is the reality for so many North Korean defectors, especially women. They are incredibly vulnerable. They’re in China illegally, so they have no rights, no protection. They live in constant fear of being caught and repatriated, which means torture or execution. This desperation is what the traffickers prey on. Jackson: It’s a nightmare layered on top of a nightmare. So how do they even begin to navigate that? How do you find freedom when you’re someone’s property?

Olivia: That’s the final, and perhaps most difficult, part of her journey. After two years of exploitation in China—a period that included her father escaping to join them, only to die of untreated cancer, and Yeonmi herself becoming the mistress of her trafficker to protect her mother—they are finally rescued by Christian missionaries. They make another perilous journey, this time on foot across the Gobi Desert into Mongolia. Jackson: The Gobi Desert. Of course. Because nothing in this story is easy. Olivia: Nothing. But they make it. And eventually, they land in South Korea. And you’d think, this is it. This is freedom. But Yeonmi describes stepping off the plane and feeling like she’d landed on a different planet. Jackson: The culture shock must have been overwhelming. Olivia: It was profound. She gets to the resettlement center, Hanawon, and during her interrogation, the agent asks her to share her hobbies. She freezes. The concept of a "hobby," of doing something just for pleasure, was completely alien to her. She’d spent her entire life just trying to survive. When asked her favorite color, she panics, because in North Korea, there’s always a "right" answer, and she doesn't know what it is. Jackson: Wow. That really shows how freedom isn't just about a lack of physical walls. It's a mindset you have to learn. It’s the freedom to have a preference, to have an opinion. Olivia: Exactly. And this is where her story gets even more complex. She enrolls in a top university in Seoul, she starts appearing on television, and she becomes a public figure. But with that fame comes scrutiny. Jackson: Right. This is what I was wondering about. She's become this massive voice, but her story has also faced criticism, hasn't it? Some journalists and experts have pointed out inconsistencies in her accounts over time. How do we, as readers, navigate that? Olivia: It's a really important question, and the book doesn't shy away from that complexity. Park and her co-author acknowledge that trauma deeply affects memory. Some details may have shifted in the retelling, or were changed initially to protect people. But critics argue some inconsistencies are significant. However, what most agree on, and what I think is the book's core truth, is its powerful, visceral depiction of the regime's brutality and the psychological cost of survival. The emotional truth of her experience is undeniable, even if some specific details are debated. Jackson: That makes sense. The essence of the story—the oppression, the trafficking, the struggle to heal—that remains profoundly true. And it seems like she ultimately decided that telling her story, even with the risks, was a crucial part of her own freedom. Olivia: It was. She says that for the longest time, she was ashamed of what happened to her in China. But she realized that to be truly free, she had to own her entire story. Her speech in Dublin, where she broke down and spoke from the heart about her mother's rape, was that turning point. She found her voice by telling the truth, no matter how painful.

Jackson: So when you look at the whole journey, from the psychological prison of North Korea, to the physical and moral horror of the escape, to this long, painful process of learning to be free in South Korea... what’s the biggest takeaway for you? Olivia: For me, the book completely redefines the word "freedom." We use it so casually. But Yeonmi Park’s story shows that freedom isn’t a passport or a location on a map. It’s not something that’s given to you. It’s something you have to build inside yourself, often from the ashes of unimaginable trauma. It's the daily, exhausting work of unlearning fear, of learning to trust, of learning you have a right to an opinion, a hobby, a favorite color. Jackson: It’s an internal process, not an external event. Her story is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, but it’s also a warning not to romanticize survival. The scars are real and they last a lifetime. Olivia: They do. And her ultimate decision to become an activist, to use her voice for those still trapped, feels like the final step in her own liberation. She quotes the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who said he didn't feel free until he had spoken out. For Yeonmi, finding her voice was how she finally owned herself. Jackson: That’s incredibly powerful. It really makes you think... what parts of our own thinking are we not free from? What invisible cages do we live in without even realizing it? It’s a question that stays with you long after you finish the book. We'd love to hear what freedom means to you after hearing this story. Join the conversation and let us know your thoughts. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.